No-Name Bloggers | D., Part 2

No-Name Bloggers is a series that features posts from individuals who do not have public blogs of their own. No-Name Bloggers are encouraged to write about one of four themes: feminism, anti-racism, recovery, or personal introspection.

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No-Name Blogger D.

So, one (not-entirely-unexpected) consequence of deciding to deal with the aftermath of Stewart and admitting that I was abused and that I let myself be abused (I’m still working on integrating this into “I was abused” without, you know, the blame thing, but honestly, that’s the crux of it and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to. Fun fact – My head hurts and I’m clenching my jaw writing that and I can already feel the it wasn’t your fault YES IT WAS no, you aren’t to blame for what he did I STAYED, DIDN’T I? conversation gearing up. I think my first sign of progress will be getting the italics to speak for me and say it wasn’t my fault instead of your.) is that the process of self examination is taking me back further than just Stewart.

So, uncovered this afternoon, after my little “I’m going into therapy. I’m going into therapy NEXT WEEK” freak out (sorry about that) is a little fuck you to my first serious boyfriend.

Dear Nick,

We dated for a long time. Two years in high school means we were practically engaged, man. That’s some serious commitment. I loved you dearly, I trusted you. I listened to all your stories and excuses for your apathy and how dropping out of high school and staying home to play video games and smoke pot was really your unique way of sticking it to the man and not laziness and self-indulgence. I didn’t buy it, really, but I understood that you were lost too, and, well – you were smart, you were funny, I loved you and I kinda felt responsible for giving you your first joint and introducing you to my cousin, your dealer, in the first place.

Plus – I could crash at your place if I needed to. And I needed to. A lot. I was cold enough, pragmatic enough, that this didn’t escape my notice.

So, because I trusted you and I loved you and I needed you, I told you about being raped when I was thirteen. I told you how I was at a bush party and I was with my friends (the ones I stopped hanging around shortly after the incident no one talked about but made it so I was No Longer Welcome and nobody could look me in the eye after, unless they wanted me to score some weed for them, because, dude, priorities). I told you I was very, very drunk because 100 pounds soaking wet and a mickey of cheap vodka will do that to you. I told you how I was stumbling home when one of the guys just happened to be walking that way too, and we talked and laughed and just before we got out of the woods he started kissing me and putting his hands up my shirt. I told you I kissed him back and tried to laugh it off: “We’re both pretty drunk, dude. I need to get home now.” I told you he didn’t stop and by the time I realized he wouldn’t stop, I was on the ground and he had his fingers inside me and was moaning about how tight I was.

I told you I was raped on the ground, in the dirt, ten minutes away from my front door. I told you I didn’t scream because he had his arm over my mouth and I couldn’t bite hard enough through his shirt and his hoodie to get to the air. I told you he was too heavy and my jeans were stuck around my knees and I couldn’t even kick. I told you he pulled out because he didn’t want to knock me up and came on my stomach instead.

I told you he pulled up my pants and pulled down my shirt when all I could do was lie there and try to breathe. I wouldn’t get up with him, after. He still wanted to walk me home. He got mad and called me a bitch and a drunk and a slut and finally said “Fine. Fuck you then” (hahahahaha – youalreadydid) and left.

I told you I vomited then. Quietly. Discreetly. Because I was still pretty drunk, of course. (of course)

I told you I crawled home and had to sneak in through the basement window. I couldn’t shower because that would wake up my parents and they couldn’t ever know I had snuck out and gone drinking and had sex in the woods. So I huddled in my room, under the blankets, coated in leaves and dirt and twigs and blood and come and vomit for two hours before it was safe for me to be awake without arousing suspicion, because I was smart like that. I threw the clothes out in one of the garbage bags in the garage and took my dog for a walk, which was a normal thing to do on a Sunday. (and I had to be normal because no one could ever, ever know)

I told you this, because I loved you and trusted you and thought you were neat. And I wanted to have sex with you, I really did, but I thought I had to explain why I might get freaked out and why you might have to stop.

And you were great when I told you. You really, really were. You cried and you hugged me and you said you were so, so sorry and that it wasn’t my fault and you loved me and thought I was awesome.

So, explain then, how, when after several failed attempts to have sex sober, where I would freeze up and shut down and tell you to stop (which you did, every time, thank you for not raping me too), I finally got blasted drunk and said we should just get it over with (and we did and it sucked but hey, the ice was broken now and the weight of the First Time wasn’t hanging over us, never mind that I was all of fifteen and maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t be having sex yet, and maybe, just maybe, ‘I think I’m drunk enough to stomach it’ shouldn’t have been the green light), how after all of that, explain how, exactly, I can walk into an earnest conversation you’re having with our friends about how bad it sucked that I wasn’t a virgin for you.

And then explain why Chris, someone I HADN’T told, piped up and said: “Well, didn’t she have that happen to her?” (because you mustn’t call it rape. Such an ugly word.)

And then have the balls to ask me why I was never in the mood.

Fuck You,

D. the secretly relieved when you moved away and laughed in your face when you moved back to try and ‘make it work’.

There’s more to the Nick story than that, of course. Stewart wasn’t the first time that I let a relationship go on far longer than it should. Most of it is stupid, teenage stuff – mixed in with my crazy mom and fucked up friends and way too many drugs, but this was the beginning of the end for us. And if I’d ditched Nick back then, I would have lost a lot of friends, because he had the party house where we all hung out. And I’d run out of people I could like already. My hometown is a fucked up little community of isolation and rampant greed, my story isn’t all that unique. I know people with worse.

One of my ex roommates, who had been my friend since we were in swimming lessons at age three, and who I later lost to crack, had the nickname Blueberry Hill. There’s a joke, see, about this substitute teacher who’s taking attendance when a boy walks in late. “What’s your name?” she asks, checking the rolls. “Sammy.” “And where were you, Sammy?” “On blueberry hill.” She checks his name off and resumes taking attendance. Another boy comes in late. “What’s your name?” “Joey.” “And where were you, Joey?” “On blueberry hill.” Five minutes later, another boy walks in. “What’s your name?” “Billy.” “And where were you, Billy?” “On blueberry hill.” Five more minutes pass and a girl walks in late. “What’s your name?” the teacher asks, getting really irritated. “Blueberry Hill.” *drum roll*

My roommate earned her nickname because she passed out at a party and all the guys took turns on “Blueberry Hill.”

Clever little monsters, weren’t they?

She was sixteen. These had been our friends. These were people we went to school with, who made it impossible to walk down the hallway with your head up unless you could be meaner, and angrier, than they were. I was lucky, because I got raped in junior high and went to a different high school and didn’t have to see them every day, like she did. I just had to make sure that the bus that took me downtown let me off a stop before the main terminal so I could walk home, because they lived in my neighbourhood and it’s fucking impossible to sit on a bus and make small talk with the assholes that raped your friend.

And none of us would have gone to the police, because that’s not how it worked. It wasn’t even a concept. We knew nobody cared, or would believe us. Why were we out getting drunk with boys if we didn’t want that to happen?(It couldn’t happen to me) Where were our fucking parents? (Mine were busy trying to destroy each other as quietly as possible – except of course in their bedroom at night when they forgot the walls weren’t soundproofed. Her mom was working night shift at the plants because her husband had walked out and left her with two daughters to raise on her own, until she met a man with four daughters of his own and a drug problem.) And ours weren’t the only stories out there, it was almost a fucking rite of passage. (In retrospect I can see that there were some people who gave a damn, some teachers that tried to reach out to me, some parents of non-fucked up friends who I’d stopped hanging out with that were concerned, but at the time it was just us damaged kids against the world and we were blind to kindness.)

I met the hippy and his friends a year after I first moved away from my hometown. (At 19, I got out as soon as I had enough money to move.) They talked about books, and movies and music instead of drugs, and alcohol, and fuck the police. They knew about politics and history and went to the kind of schools that took field trips to Europe. (I went on field trip a few hours South in grade 5. There were dinosaurs. It was awesome.) They liked their parents. They liked each other.

They blew my fucking mind.

I studied them, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible, and avoided the ones who looked like they knew I was broken. I learned how to reframe my stories so they weren’t horrifying to people who didn’t understand (normal people). They were still mostly true, and they were still pretty funny (as long as I could edit them right – one time I got it wrong and realized about halfway through the telling of the story about The Time I Got Away couldn’t possibly be spun into entertainment outside of a very small group of people. I shut up and I didn’t say much for the rest of the night and hoped that my date would just pretend it hadn’t happened), but certain parts got obscured and I tried to age myself because I was beginning to realize that starting drinking when you’re eleven is kind of fucked up (to normal people). I felt my way around the boundaries of social interactions, and learned to develop a filter for my experiences (but not much of one, just enough to be outrageous without coming off as damaged).

I learned how to have fun, real fun, and make plans and be myself. I learned how to pay rent, and buy groceries and save money and function like a normal person too. Some of them were artists, and they liked my stuff and we got together and painted each other.

They adopted me, essentially, and I loved them all. Even the prickly ones, like J. And the sad ones, like G. And the snobby ones, like S. And the pretentious ones, like Andy. But especially the hippy, who was dark enough to laugh at my jokes without giving me that look, but still normal enough that he could point out how fucked up my past was (also without that look), and cold enough that he could agree with me that my mother was probably not a good person to keep in my life (I tried to cut her out a dozen times before – it’s only in the last four years that it’s really started to work).

They gave me the foundation to start building new stories, ones I could tell honestly, anywhere. (I still feel out of place at social gatherings, with normal people, because I don’t have enough of these ‘safe’ stories stockpiled. I have to bite my tongue whenever the conversation turns to family, and childhood, because, shit… Where do I even start?)

They saved my life.

When I talked to the hippy the other night, I told him that another reason I am so mad at myself for Stewart is because I’ve cried harder over what he did to me than I ever did over any of this. (Except maybe my mother. I’ve shed a lot of tears for her, and because of her, over the years.)

I think maybe I feel like I’m betraying myself by getting so fucked up over him, instead of by being a juvenile delinquent/escape artist. Like, somehow, this had more validity. Because I was younger? Because it was more obviously horrific? Because I thought I was better? I don’t know. It feels like all of them, right now.

But writing this didn’t give me the same anxiety as writing about Stewart does. This feels so far away and I’ve mostly made my peace with my shitty past and I can look at it now and feel sorry for the girl I was, and what she went through, and the only real anger I feel over this is to the asshole that raped me, my parents for being my parents, the assholes who weren’t really my friends, and the fucked up nature of a society where this shit can happen and nobody does a goddamn thing. I was a cunning kid, I’ll grant you – but fuck me, somebody had to have noticed something wasn’t right.

I still have my damage, of course, and I suspect when I really start unravelling the tapestry of Stewart, I’m going to be back here again.

This was supposed to be a Fuck You letter to Nick, with maybe a sashay into the cumulative effects of a dozen small betrayals.

I was going to build a Washington Monument of Fuck You with my words today.

This, I don’t even know what to call this. A post-apocalyptic ruin of a city attempting a revival, maybe? Or a haunted village built over a burial ground?

I like the apocalypse metaphor better. Stewart can be the bomb that dropped on the survivors who had just started to believe the worst was over. And, even as a comparatively small bomb, if it hits too close to the center, things fall apart.

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